Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  But Thomas knew full well, deep within, that it wasn’t for Nancy alone. She was an excuse for a more selfish, more personal desire. In his mind, he fantasized about Adam and Eve, and the new Eden, after the poor overpopulated, polluted, unlivable garbage dump that the exhausted Earth had turned into, that they had left behind them, like so many others.

  The space colonies at the LaGrange points had been a costly, yet temporary solution, like so many efforts to set up colonies on the planets and the satellites in the solar system. Terraforming was a nice idea, but it had been more difficult to put into practice than expected on such different, hostile worlds. Changing the entire ecosystem of a planet was feasible, of course. A daunting task, but one within human reach. But creating and maintaining a habitable world in its entirety, a world capable of supporting entire populations and not just minuscule, precarious oases of human life had been beyond humanity’s reach; almost insurmountable. Entropy is a force you don’t ridicule without consequences. An entire planet is stubborn and implacable in its resistance. And the movements of its moods, its ability to test the science and willpower of its invaders, were considerable. Humans had urgency on their side. The new world had time and space.

  But they were both ready to try again on this strange world.

  And, at the start, everything went smoothly. No problems with conception. Normal growth. No complications. Nancy and Thomas were both strong and in good health. Otherwise, they would never have been accepted for the mission. The first pains had appeared last evening. Thomas reassured her, had prepared everything. She was smiling, confident, happy. And then, this morning, complications set in. The anxious waiting, the concern. Nancy’s suffering. The child who just would not come. And the evidence. He couldn’t deny it any longer. She needed a caesarian. And quickly! Or Thomas would lose them both. Nancy was still confident, “You’ll manage,” she whispered before falling asleep.

  “We’ll manage,” Thomas had replied, without knowing for sure that she had heard.

  At the start everything went well. The operation proceeded normally. It was difficult, but he was coping. And then the unstoppable hemorrhage. Blood everywhere. Life fleeing from two places at once. And Thomas’ desperate efforts to stop it. An intense battle waged for half an hour. Finally, he arrested the red flow. But it was too late. She had lost too much blood. There was nothing else he could do. He didn’t have enough of Nancy’s blood, collected during the previous months. He had no plasma for a transfusion. And their blood types were incompatible.

  Slowly, regretfully, his hands slip from Nancy’s face. He stands up and, like a sleepwalker, heads toward the metal locker. He opens the door, finds the case, undoes the strap, and gets out the gun. He stares at it for a long time, then places it against his temple and takes off the safety … the cry stops him.

  He turns and sees the small being wriggling and howling in the drawer that serves as her cradle. He questions his actions, finding it hard to come to terms. The piercing cries rise over the howls of the Great Winds. He looks at the revolver again. He’s entitled to end his life, isn’t he? He’s entitled to decide for himself. Yes, for himself! But not for her! She cries on. She’s hungry.

  Still he hesitates. A second too long. His hand tightens on, then releases the cold trigger. If he kills himself, she will die too. And then he would be responsible for two deaths. And Nancy’s death would have been in vain.

  Slowly, he places the gun back in its case and heads to the kitchen, picks up a box of powdered milk, fills a pan with water and lights the stove. He still feels like a sleepwalker, but a sleepwalker with a purpose. He fills the bottle, adjusts a finger from a rubber glove over the mouth, pierces it with a needle, and returns to the bedroom. He bends down over his daughter and feeds her. She stops crying. With his free hand, he touches the baby. She’s normal. Perfect, even. The excessive gravity doesn’t seem to have had any harmful effects.

  She has to live. That’s what Nancy would have wanted. He knows that now. He will live for her.

  The water flows quickly down the furrows formed by the fold in the oilcloth. It feels like it has been raining for centuries, yet the rainy season only started four weeks ago. In the deafening racket of the storm, Thomas closes the rusty, creaking door of the barn. He has found and plugged seven openings where the rain was coming in. There are certainly others but he hasn’t managed to find them. It is a never-ending task, as if the rain can drill holes in the metal, like acid. His boots sink in over his ankles in the thick mud. Every step he takes causes a disgusting sucking sound, as if some monstrous mollusk is trying to immobilize him and swallow him whole. And the heat. It’s stifling. And then there is the humidity…

  Thomas squints, trying to make out something through the dense, flowing curtains that crush the ground, drowning and blurring everything, colours, shapes, perspectives. The weak, gloomy light at the end of day doesn’t make matters any better. He closes his eyes, rubs them. His vision has been getting worse and worse with the years. Too many ultraviolets. That damned sun in the dry season.

  Too bad. Even if he can’t see it, he knows where the cistern is. About twenty metres to the right, behind the greenhouses. He starts walking and a new dizziness grips him after a few steps. He stops, wavers, staggers, and a veil of blackness descends in front of his eyes. He has to lean against a wall.

  Damn and damn again. It’s back. Like this morning before breakfast. He’s done too much today. His weakness has been growing at an alarming rate. Soon, he won’t be able to hide it anymore. He won’t even be able to get out of bed on his own. The veil lifts, finally, and the world stops being a senseless dark whirlpool. Thomas slowly starts for the tank again. The conduit filters need to be looked at, and probably changed. And it has to be done today. At the start of the year, when the rains return, you always feel as if you’re drowning in all that falling water. You panic, struggle for air, gasp, spit, suffocate. And then, you realize that you can breathe, despite all common sense, and calm gradually returns. But then, you get all worked up again over the constant hammering of the rain, with its continual, haunting din. But, there too, you’re wrong, the racket transforms into a familiar, monotonous background noise, almost reassuring in its regularity. You get used to it. Pushed by necessity, and given enough time, humans can get used to almost everything, in fact. The tall cylindrical metal shape finally emerges before his eyes, nothing more than a vague mass, but the only truly solid-looking object insinuated in the liquid landscape, a tangible island lost in the middle of the fluid.

  Thomas walks around the cistern, stepping over the conduits and pipes, then finally finds the ladder and starts to climb up. Once or twice, he feels his feet slip on the wet metal bars, but catches himself in time, tightening his grip. He climbs up to the platform and bends over to examine the inside of the cistern. The water is almost to the top. He should have climbed up two days ago. But there was a more pressing urgency. The generator had given out and he had had to repair it. He walks over to the valves. The platform is as slippery as the rungs of the ladder. The water continues to trickle down, flowing in a miniature waterfall over the steel rim. He grabs the first rusty wheel and braces himself against it with all his strength, all his weight. Very slowly, with a terrible grinding of metal against metal, the large wheel turns and Thomas hears, rising out of the bottom of the cistern, the sound of water rushing to the large discharge pipe, flowing down to water the valley below. He only opens the valve halfway, then moves past the second large valve, without touching it, stopping in front of the gauges. He wipes the rain from them and takes the readings. Delicately, carefully, he sets them. He has to reduce the flow of water sent to the crops in the largest greenhouse. He’s still having a few problems there. So much to do! These daily chores never end. He waits for the level of the water to drop two full metres, then slowly closes the first valve. That should do. He turns back, struggling to see around him. From the top of the cistern,
which dominates all the other buildings, he has a much better view. No shape, no movement on the moving carpet of the rice field, although a small gray shadow rapidly makes its way between the barn and the stable, heading for the house. Thomas smiles weakly.

  Once again, he grabs the bars and starts climbing slowly back down. A moment’s confusion. A sudden weakness overtakes him and his fingers let go on their own. Everything goes dark and he falls like an anguished cry.

  “Papa!”

  The landing is rough, but the thick mud absorbs some of the shock. For a long time, everything is dark and silent. No sensation other than the sharp, biting pain. Then a vague, drab whirlpool.

  Someone seats him. Emma’s wet, worried face slowly emerges from the whirlpool, like some apparition from a forgotten world, which held something other than suffering and shadows.

  “Are you all right? You didn’t hurt yourself? You didn’t break anything?”

  “I’m fine,” he murmurs.

  His right leg is causing him a great deal of pain. A moment or two later, he tries to stand up, but is unable to put any weight on his injured leg. He slips, sprawling on the ground. She helps him to stand up again and shoulders his weight as she walks him to their home.

  They take off their raincoats and, while she hangs them up, he pulls up his pant leg, cautiously removes his socks, and considers his leg. The ankle is blue, already thoroughly swollen. The pain is killing him, but a more thorough examination confirms that nothing is broken.

  Emma returns and forces him, with words and actions, to stretch out on the bed. Another, silent, examination of his ankle. Thomas watches her with the vague sense of nostalgia that has become far too familiar to him in recent months; a feeling he experiences every time he really looks at her. How the years pass! To think that she’s already fifteen years old. He thinks that she has started looking more and more like her mother. But he’s wrong. She’s not, she never will be Nancy. In fact, although she has the fine, slightly curly blonde hair of her mother, and her deep blue eyes, nothing else in her face resembles either Thomas or Nancy. Nothing about her stature either. She’s so tiny, barely five feet tall, almost stocky, but strong and resistant. Nancy and Thomas created her, but the planet shaped and polished her. The results are interesting — she’s rather pretty and, despite her smallness, her figure is harmonious and proportionate. Above all, she’s suited for this world, her environment, her living conditions. Much more so than Thomas ever will be.

  And Emma is definitely not a little girl anymore, but a woman. That observation amuses him … and frightens him, both at the same time. Probably because he feels old all of a sudden, much older than he thought he would be prepared to admit.

  Yet it seems like it was just yesterday that he still had to feed her, that he taught her to read, to fold clothes, to change the tarnished plates of the unused solar panels, to pick rice, to feed and milk the Big Ears, as she calls the indigenous “cows” that they had managed to domesticate over the years, that he read her stories at night, during the winds, as she sat on his lap.

  That he was guiding her.

  It has been so difficult to teach her, to make her understand, often without being able to show her. To train her, with so few examples, so little material, and no other advice, no point of view other than his own. How can you explain the ocean? A city? A crowd of people on a world where there have never been more than two people? A blue sky? A forest in the Fall? Snow? How can you explain Life, all of life, another life to someone like Emma who was born and has always lived here? What moral or ethical groundwork should he give her? What models could he suggest? How can you teach existence when you’re doing it all alone, when no one else is there to discuss matters with you, temper your claims, your beliefs? Where there is no one to contradict you?

  Emma looks up from his ankle, to stare at him gravely.

  ‘It’s only a wicked sprain,” Thomas says reassuringly, perhaps a little too quickly. “So what’s the matter? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  His daughter glances down at his ankle for a second then back up at him again. “You’re right, it’s only a sprain. But you could have killed yourself falling from that height.”

  Uncomfortable, he looks away. “So, and then what? It didn’t happen, did it? Why don’t you go and fix us something to eat while I bind this?”

  She doesn’t budge. He pretends to get up, but she pushes him back onto the bed. Surprised, he watches her as she heads over to the medicine cabinet. She returns, arms laden with bandages and adhesive tape, a bottle of analgesics and a glass of water. She makes him swallow the tablets, then starts to bind his ankle. Her movements are a little too abrupt, her lips pinched. Worried, he bends over and clasps her by the shoulders.

  “So, what’s wrong, then? What have I done?”

  “For weeks now, you’ve been treating your daughter like an idiot. Or like a blind person!”

  He doesn’t know what to say. She has never spoken to him like this. A moment later, she calms down enough to continue. “Every day, you’re a little paler, a little weaker. You’re wasting away before my eyes. Your face is all hollows and crevasses. You barely eat and you race off to sleep at night like a prisoner looking for freedom. You take medication when you think I’m not looking. You frequently have weak spells. —Don’t deny it. I’ve seen you do it several times. Something’s wrong with you. You are seriously ill and you’re trying to keep it from me.”

  Two silences, one hurt, the other ashamed. Thomas hadn’t thought his condition and his symptoms were already so obvious. He has been so successful at lying to himself, over and over again each morning, that he forgot he had to lie as well to his daughter.

  “What would you have gained by knowing?”

  “It’s a simple matter of respect. And good sense, as well. How can you expect me to treat you if I don’t know anything? What’s wrong with you?”

  Thomas closes his eyes, sighs and decides to tell her. “I’ve got leukemia.”

  He can tell by her look that the word doesn’t mean much to her. He should have known it. Clumsily, he adds, “It’s a disease of the blood. It makes you terribly weak.”

  Now there’s a euphemism for you!

  “Well, that’s not very precise as far as definitions go,” she comments, cutting the adhesive tape with her teeth and using it on the bandages. She bites her lip before continuing, “Is it serious? Are you going to die?”

  He hesitates a little too long, his hesitation betraying him. So, he decides to stop trying to hide things from her, to stop lying through omission.

  “Yes. We don’t have what we need to treat me effectively.” That confession, torn from him, brings relief.

  “And how … how much time do you think you’ve got left?”

  He closes his eyes. She certainly has no intention of indulging him today. “Ten months, a year, maybe more. I don’t know.”

  He somehow finds it necessary to add, “There have been cases of spontaneous remission. It’s not completely hopeless.”

  She stands up. “You should have told me as soon as you found out.” Her tone is hard, heavy with reproach, but her lower lip trembles a little and her eyes are damp. She turns away, quickly disappearing into the kitchen before he can say or do anything. After a minute of heavy silence, he hears her rattling around, making the meal. Outside, night falls, very quickly, as it always does. The shadows stretch into the house, like ink spilled on a piece of paper. The pain decreases, becoming as deaf and distant as the light. Thomas stands up and starts the generator. Then he limps slowly over to the kitchen and turns the lights on. Emma has set the table in the darkness and is busy next to the pressure cooker that she plugged in when she heard the generator start. He sits down awkwardly as she prepares the meal, finding the situation almost as ridiculous as it is painful. She ignores him. Thomas barely dares to look at her,
let alone make a gesture or speak a word to attempt to batter down that thick wall of silence, almost unthinkable before now, that has been built between them. A wall he had the misfortune to build. The supper is icy, almost sinister. Neither speaks, neither looks at the other. It’s even more oppressive when the continuous noise of the rain abates, then slowly stops, as if regretful. Neither eats much.

  As he stands up, at the end of the meal, Thomas feels his injured, numbed leg collapse under him. He accidentally hits the table and a plate falls to the floor. They both bend over at the same time to catch it or at least pick it up. Their heads bump and suddenly they both find themselves on the ground. They stare at one another, dazed, then Emma bursts into laughter and Thomas manages to join her. A cheerful, open laugh that comforts, pardons, and reassures. They help each other up, clear the table and get down to the dishes, like they do any other night.

  It was as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. They talk about the day’s events, the unknown illness that has been eating away at some of the female “cows” for a few days now, of the possibility of a poor rice crop this season, of their surprising success with various new types of plants and edible roots that they brought back from their brief two-day trip to the North, during the dry season. In short, they talk of everything and nothing.

  The dishwater is too cold. Thomas will have to take another look at the water heater he put together a few years ago. It just isn’t working right. Then, like every other evening, they move to the living room. Thomas installs himself in an easy chair, after plugging in the radiator, while she finds a diskette and plugs it into the last disk reader that works. This month, it’s Emma’s choice. For two weeks now, they’ve buried themselves in the Odyssey, which had been unfamiliar to her until now. She reads slowly, ponderously. Her voice, often filled with emotion, is already a little too deep, too warm, for a girl her age, Thomas thinks. She’s growing older so quickly. They’re both growing older so quickly. From time to time they stop, either for an explanation — “What’s a sheep?” “What does a Cyclops look like?” — which he tries to provide, while pointing out that she shouldn’t always rely on him and she should sometimes look things up in the visual dictionary, or to discuss a point, a situation in the tale. This evening, they don’t take turns reading the men’s and women’s dialogues. The pain is increasing in his leg as the evening progresses. When Thomas stretches out and starts to yawn, she ejects the book and regretfully turns off the reader. They turn out all the lights. The pale glow of the two red moons shimmering in through the large portholes is strong enough as they make their way to the bedroom. They prepare for bed, wish each other good night, and stretch out on their respective cots. Thomas relaxes gratefully into the soft mattress. He’s so tired.